Best Practices — User Acceptance Testing

Is User Acceptance Testing the milestone stopping you? Are you struggling with validating end user needs? Do you wish to get better insights with your user acceptance tests? Here are a few tips and best practices that can set you on the right track to make an impact.

Understand user personas

Know your target audience. Who are the direct buyers? What are their problems/needs? Where they hangout? What is their motivation? How you can reach them? How you can best incentivize them? What controls their behavior? When you have all this info prior to initiating an UAT cycle, it saves your wasted efforts and help you get directed results.

Spending some time defining and researching about user personas keeps everyone on the same page and brings awareness regarding who your users are.

Prepare UAT Plan well in advance

Usually UAT is conducted prior to launch. At this time you are already under pressure of meeting deadlines and excited about the end user response for your product or service. Hence planning an UAT cycle at this point of time might make you skip some real life use cases which are obvious and often. Resource availability is another constraint that might creep in during this phase of development life cycle. This hampers parallel execution of different phases. To avoid any such situation do plan for UAT early, Here is a user acceptance testing checklist that can get you started.

Have a well structured UAT management system

For a smooth UAT phase you need to choose the right tools. The UAT management tools should a perfect mix of team collaboration and bug tracking features. Easy filtering options, Efficient reporting dashboard and traceability matrix comparing requirements and results and security are the main features you need to look at when selecting the UAT management tool.

A management tool that completes the loop right from recording the actions of actual testers(users) to generating reports to update stakeholders the status of tests. Thus engaging them all in decisions.

Identify stakeholders who truly own acceptance

Stakeholders are a great source for new ideas as well as uncerainity. Identifying key stakeholders at the time of defining requirements is impaortant. If your stakeholders are not satisfied then the project is not a success. But, all the stakeholder are not equally authoritative and concerned. During the course of the project you work closely with different stakeholder groups and subgroups. That is when you understand who dominates the flow of ideas among the stakeholders. These stakeholders are the ones whom you can depend on, when it comes to user acceptance testing. At this stage you cannot change the course of action. Only nitty gritties can be taken up for resolution. So you need to choose and pick the right stakeholders.

Create user stories based on business requirements and scenarios

User acceptance testing can be an eye operener, if the right set of users are targetted. To target the expected users, user scenarios need to be created in sync with the business requiremnets. In short you can say it like user stories are nothing but well explained business requirements. Bill Wake’s INVEST model clearly defines what a good user story should be like.

INVEST Modal for user stories

Clearly define acceptance criteria

Before proceeding with the user acceptance tests, its necessary to define the event that you would consider a success. What would define that the product passed/failed the acceptance test. Figures and numbers need to be researched so as to set a satisfactory scale to the UAT observations. If not then The whole exercise may go in vain, without reaching to a solution. To reach the consensus and to mark boundaries, the acceptance criteria serves as the base.

For example: Acceptance citeria for feedback form for the given use case would be-

Usecase:

“As a website user, I want to able to submit feedback. So that the website owners can consider my opinion or concern during future website updates.”

Acceptance criteria:

“Scenario: User submits feedback form with the valid data

“Given I’m in a role of logged-in or guest user
When I open the Feedback page
Then the system shows me the Submit Feedback form containing “Email”,“Name” and “Comment” fields which are required
When I fill in the “Email” field with a valid email address
And I fill in the “Name” field with my name
And I fill in the “Comment” field with my comment
And I click the “Submit Feedback” button
Then the system submits my feedback
And the system shows the “You’ve successfully submitted your feedback” flash message
And the system clears the fields of the Submit Feedback form”

Clear Acceptance criteria saves time and resources.

Conclusion

Effective UAT lets you validate-Is it solving the problem, it is intended to solve in the real life? Are your assumptions close to reality? Is it going to make money? Can it be launched? and much more.So, take an informed decision to plan, execute, analyze and enhance this phase of development life cycle.

Client/User inputs are a crucial part of the project lifecycle.zipBoard makes it easy to manage and track all this User acceptance testing feedback so that your team can collaborate better. Clients/users can annotate on designs, live websites and HTML prototypes and add comments. You can track changes and get everyone in sync on your team. Be it a designer, developer or manager, zipBoardis easy enough and useful for everyone in the team.